Malcolm X' Relationship with the Nation of Islam

Malcolm X was one of the seminal figures of the African-American community in the 1960s. Having begun life as the largely abandoned child of a mother who became insane, served time in prison, and ultimately joined the Nation of Islam and becoming one of its most influential advocates, Malcolm X represents what Nancy Clasby considers to have been the full gamut of experiences that are available for black Americans in the first half of the twentieth century.[1] Having lived in the agrarian and the northern industrialized regions of the country, "Malcolm had already lived in an atmosphere of explicit violence - his father was laid across the streetcar tracks and killed by whites and their home was burned because of his father's allegiance to Marcus Garvey."[2]

While he was in prison, Malcolm Little (also known as Detroit Red) embraced the religious ideology of the Nation of Islam and its leader, Elijah Muhammad. Adopting the belief that "the white man is the devil," Malcolm attempted to create himself anew by breaking down the "old master-slave relationship which characterized the ties of the black minority to white society."[3]

Had he wished to do so, Malcolm X could have found a religious and theological home in the Christian Protestant churches where his father was a pastor. E. Franklin Frazier has stated that "for the masses of Negroes, the Negro Church was a refuge, though increasingly less of a refuge, in a hostile white world."[4] Indeed, other men of Malco

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m, the identity of Elijah Mohammed was initially bound to the struggling Muslim people and although he did later break with Elijah Mohammed, he is said by Clasby to have continued to view the man as the most important influence in his life.[19] After his return from Mecca in 1964, Malcolm X shocked the world in general and infuriated the NOI by writing that "we were truly all the same (brothers) - because their belief in one God had removed the white from their minds, the white from their behavior, and the white from their attitude."[20] The transformation from Malcolm Little to Detroit Red to Malcolm X to El Hajj Malik el Shabazz signified his association with Muslims who were faithful to the original tenets of Islam and a movement away from the NOI.[21] Having broken with the NOI, Malcolm X is said to have turned away from violence and separatism. Historian C. Eric Lincoln makes the case in The Black Muslims in America which was originally published in 1961 that the NOI did not grow as anticipated in part because of the murder of Malcolm X and the NOI's continued insistence on the separation of blacks and whites.[22] While Lincoln recognizes that a driving force within the NOI was its unremitting hatred of white Ameri

Category: History - M